Abednego cast into it, furnished both the
Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of
hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and
to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament.
The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be
chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the
Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age,
this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus,
finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of
burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of
fiends and shrieking souls.

Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil
in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot
chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he
seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and
with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat.
Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their
tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons
of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on
an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained
through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell
will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they
will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since
outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in
the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes
of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract
from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published
with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the
children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J.
Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage
which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of
tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a
large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon
there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two
long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing
fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle
boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy.
The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is
boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven.